When was the last time any Office application didn't brake file compatibility with previous versions.
Once again, for all of you people who just can't be helped to do any research on Office format compatibility:
You can download the Office Compatibility Pack for free and install it on any version of Office all the way back to Office XP. This will let you read the Office 2007 formats. Office 2007 itself can save in the Office 97-2003 format, in addition to a variety of other formats.
There's a lot of legitimate complaints you can make about Microsoft, but the one you can never really make is that they ignore backwards compatibility. Microsoft, in fact, goes to considerable lengths to maintain backwards compatibility -- more than they ought to, some might say.
In fairness to the GP, you're incorrect about STR. STR provides a bonus to melee attacks that's roughly 50% that of the characteristic focus damage bonus, with a cap that's been recently revised to be relatively easy (some would say trivial) to reach. I'd cite the dev posts on this from the official forums, but I'm lazy and you clearly have an account and can look them up yourself.:) I will say that I do like the Characteristic Focus approach generally, but dislike the fact that, for many characters, it's far better to hit hard and fast -- which means DEX and EGO are your preferred stats. I do feel bad for people who went with PRE, given the currently broken threat mechanics. As it stands, heals, as they scale off PRE, have the highest threat generation in the entire game in order to prevent their users' high PREs from making them practically untargetable by mobs.
I'll partially agree with the GP in that the number of powers you use is relatively small, and this is coming from a Sorcery framework player -- for those not in the know, the Sorcery framework offers up a smorgasbord of powers, from AE buffs to debuffs to pets. Unfortunately, most of the powers are painfully weak due to CO's choice, just like CoH's, to use unlimited, additive effect stacking. CO also only really offers three types of attack powers: click powers, maintained powers (hold the button for a continuous effect), and charge powers (hold the button for a greater effect which is released when you left off the button). Because -- at least up to the end of beta -- very few powers had cooldowns, you really only needed one power of each type, because there wasn't a compelling argument to shuffle among multiple powers of the same type. Essentially, CO has a ton of powers to choose from, and you agonize over what to choose because all of the choices are equally poor. I'd often find myself going 4-6 levels without training up because it'd just be a waste of time to grab an extremely situational power or an awful, expensive, useless one.
I'd argue that there's two reasons why people feel unheroic in CO. One is that it's not clear a passive defensive power is mandatory for soloing, as the damage bonuses from offensive passives aren't high enough to offset the loss of survivability unless you specialize in AE attacks. Towards the end of closed beta, the devs mentioned that they were going to consider making that a bit more obvious. The second reason is that the damage balance across mob types tends to make boss (ahem, "Master Villain") fights boring. Villains have higher sustained DPS than Master Villains, while Master Villains have higher burst DPS. This is no big shock to anyone who plays most MMOs; typically, bosses hit slowly but extremely hard to keep healers from getting overwhelmed. The problem in CO is that you can hold Block to mitigate 50% or more of the damage from those big attacks, and the game tips you off on when to do this. Your passive defensives stack with this, so the overall mitigation is surprisingly high. On the other hand, you can't constantly Block against the Villains, since Blocking is a zero-sum game; you can't attack while blocking, so all you're doing is slowing the loss of HP. Perhaps most importantly, slow attacks are easier to dodge (in CO parlance; in typical design parlance, a CO Dodge is a variable mitigation applied to every attack that scales by opponent attack rate), so you'll generally mitigate more of the attack anyway. The end result is that, generally, the Master Villains end up doing less damage over time than their Villain minions. This is especially noticeable at low levels in Canada, where you fight a fair number of MVs and some, such as Mr. Zombie and the Overmind, generally can't damage you enough to overcome your HP regeneration rate. It's quite unheroic to worry more about the minions than the boss, I'd argue, but that's exactly the way the damage and mitigation mechanics in CO work. To alter this balance at higher levels, the devs made the Master Villains and especially Super Vil
In fairness to the GP, World of Warcraft doesn't require "installation" to run. You can copy it to a USB stick of sufficient size and run it from there on any computer without having to install it; I often do this when I'm on the road and want to get a bit of virtual adventure in. WoW's config is stored in its directory, not the registry.
The network copying issue, though, is indicative of a problem that isn't OS-related, I'd argue.:)
*If* it's a random sample, which given that it's an opt-in system run by a for-profit company that you'd only know about if you read InfoWorld and that requires installing a piece of software and giving out personal information to use, stretches credulity.
No, here we have an excellent example of a selection bias that essentially ensures that our sample is not representative of the population of Windows systems. In fact, I would hazard to guess that the sample is only representative of the population of machines in the SMB segment managed by technically savvy but inexperienced staff ("cowboy IT"), combined with a small set of machines in test environments across all enterprises, added to a set of personal computers run by IT personnel, conglomerated with those same IT people's work machines. That leads us to believe that this sample is reading Windows machines that aren't representative of the corporate environment as a whole, and likely not at all representative of the consumer market.
I'd love to see some evidence that the sample isn't biased to the point of being useless for drawing conclusions across the board, but I'm just not seeing it.
I'm guessing that's some sort of internal agreement with your IT department or outsourced IT provider, because speaking as someone with an Enterprise license agreement and a support contract with software support through IBM, there's nothing binding me or my users to a particular technology stack.
That said, we end up sticking with IE because of obsolete external applications. ADI Time's web site is an excellent example of a site that only runs in IE using Compatibility Mode, and since we use that for leave management at the insistence of HR and a long-running contract, we have to keep IE around. Personally, I'd like to move to Firefox or Chrome; not being subject to our normal software installation rules, I actually use Chrome as my primary browser. We don't install it and offer it as a choice for users because our users are, sadly, not the sort of people who'd deal well with being told, "Well, if it doesn't work in one browser, try the other one." Some of them don't grok that there is such a thing as a "web browser" and need to be told to open "the Internet" (i.e., Internet Explorer) instead.
I think the major limiters to F/OSS adoption in the corporation are a relative lack of mature management tools, the increased support costs due to user ineptitude and limited support resources, and general corporate inertia. Specific contracts that bind a company to a particular technology stack probably fall into the category of "more common than you'd expect, but less common than you'd think," and it's certainly not a Microsoft-specific thing -- and shame on the CIO who signs such a contract, or buys a piece of software that isn't cross-platform compatible.
Not to start a language holy war or anything, but we use IIS and the.NET Framework by choice, not because we're forced to do so.:)
Neither protocol is covered by the Open Specification Promise or the Community Promise.
So, yes, there's a potential patent issue looming here. The EU judgment quoted below is interesting in that it only requires Microsoft allow use of the interoperability information on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms, which means they could simply charge the same amount for a license to the Samba developers as they do to other companies. Depending on the nature of the patent license, that could run afoul of the GPL (if the license fee is per distributed copy, for instance, or only allows software distribution by the patent licensee -- both of which would restrict the redistribution rights of subsequent users and violate the GPL's terms).
Frankly, I feel they ought to put SMB under the Open Specification Promise, but it's entirely possible there's some patents lurking there that are licensed by Microsoft that'd make that impossible.
It's been available through volume licensing since August 7th.
At the company where I work (Enterprise Agreement, so we're not small:) ), I'm already planning our Windows 7 implementation. The moment ShoreTel, our VOIP system, releases its Windows 7 compatible software, we'll rebuild our standard image and begin our migration to 7 Enterprise. Most of our servers are running Server 2008 or 2008 R2 already anyway. The advantages from the corporate standpoint (DirectAccess, better group policy, BranchCache, MED-V application virtualization) are too good to ignore. Many of those we talk to are planning to do the same, since XP's getting rather long in the tooth these days.
Regardless of the user interface, that's how most users learn.
If you talk about large-scale ERP software, which generally violates all UI guidelines of the platforms on which it runs, you find the exact same effect. Switching from, say, Daly & Wolcott to SAP causes users to have the same reactions, even when their workflow hasn't changed. "I can't figure out how to save the sales order!" "Click the save button at the top of the screen." "Where?" "See the little disk? That's the save icon." "That's not how it was before!"
People without -- and I hate to use the term here -- "computer fluency" learn applications and interfaces, not workflows and common elements. They don't learn "working with files," they learn "saving a spreadsheet in Excel." I'm not sure what the way out of this is, but I feel the research suggest that it's working with a number of user interfaces and providing more intuitive UIs.
Xen, for instance, isn't too difficult to work with on Debian, at least, and for the price point kicks the snot out of VMWare. Unfortunately, where it's lacking is management tools unless you buy a commercial implementation.
In fact, I'd argue that there's a good bit of F/OSS that's superior to the proprietary versions, and I personally like Linux for aging computers, kiosk applications, single-purpose devices (dynamic VLAN server, static web server, FTP server, router), and any situation where TCO is predominantly determined by initial price and not ongoing support cost. This is one of the unique selling propositions for F/OSS, and focusing more on that instead of "Microsoft is evil and Windows sucks" -- especially when giving companies like Google and, to a lesser extent, Apple a free pass and ignoring the significant improvements in Microsoft software quality lately -- will win more converts. Focusing on attacking Microsoft often comes off as hypocritical and misinformed.
The claim that Microsoft forces you to upgrade Office to maintain file format compatibility is simply incorrect. Arguing that you must upgrade to continue receiving support is disingenuous, because almost every software vendor does this -- including the F/OSS ones.
NSAIDs are not safe in certain populations and opiates carry significant side effects, tolerance issues, and the risk of psychological and physical dependence. Paracetamol, despite its liver risk and (usually) lower efficacy, is generally well-tolerated. The mechanism of liver damage is such that, if you stay under your NAPQI clearance rate, you'll be fine; the dosing information on paracetamol is designed to keep people from exceeding this threshold.
As analgesics go, for long term use, paracetamol's one of the safest bets; NSAIDs will destroy your GI tract unless taken with a proton pump inhibitor such as omeprazole (Prilosec), and opiates cause physical dependency. Now, whether you consider the latter effect as something to care about is another matter entirely, but currently, drug laws in the United States present a significant obstacle to a doctor prescribing opiates properly for long-term pain management where dependency is likely.
So, paracetamol still plays a valid role in pain management. Despite the threat of liver damage, its safety profile overall is quite favorable.
Microsoft licensing can be a bit tricky at the server level, what with CALs and server licenses that both have different rules depending on which server software you're talking about, but client licensing is pretty straightforward.
There's two components you need to worry about. The first one is the OS license; the other one is Software Assurance. If you buy a computer with an OS, it's already licensed, so you don't have to worry about buying a new one. If you buy the machine bare, you need to purchase an OS license for it. Now, in both cases, the license is only for that version of the operating system and its patches/service packs. That's where Software Assurance comes in. By paying a yearly fee, you get a variety of benefits (web-based training, phone support incidents, home use rights, etc.) as well as upgrade and downgrade rights. If you have SA for Windows Client, you can upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out, or downgrade to Windows 95 if you have to for some dumb legacy app. I can't tell you if $90/year/license is correct, because it depends on your volume license agreement.
As for VL itself, you can start with Open at 5 licenses. I'd highly recommend CDW as a license partner; they're easy to talk to and quite helpful.
There was an expert system developed some time ago called Mycin. What made Mycin interesting is its high performance rate relative to other subject matter experts. In fact, to the extent to which this area's been pursued lately in academic circles (which is to say, not much; the current hot topics in AI are computer vision, emotion detection, embodied cognition, and robotics), the results have been similar. The expert systems produce results on par with, or superior to, experts in the field.
That said, there's strong pushback in this area from doctors, just as teachers and school administrators are typically opposed to intelligent tutoring systems despite their excellent outcomes. Integration with other systems and the user interface have been issues as well; academic software tends to be of the "stovepipe" variety. There's also a legitimate concern about overreliance on the technology.
It is worth noting, though, that the limited quality (in terms of sensitivity and specificity) of medical information means that the expert system actually needs to be relatively complex. You don't want the expert system to return thousands of equal probability diagnoses, or alternatively to leap to the wrong conclusion based on sparse data.
The article isn't terribly clear, but a close reading seems to indicate that the wording is a rhetorical touch; China is lending money to the United States, but it does so through the purchase of Treasury bonds. Treasury bonds constitute a means of financing a budget deficit, you see, so you can view China buying Treasury bonds sold by the U.S. to generate funds to cover a budget deficit as China lending money to the U.S. to finance its deficit. (As a side note, you can view buying bonds in a company in the same light; a bond is, in essence, a financial instrument that constitutes a loan.)
In short, it's exactly as the GP says it is. CBS tried to dumb it down and in the process created an article that's somewhat confusing to those who know more than nothing about the subject.:)
I've got to wonder what search terms you're using, because the Bing search results for "the dark knight" are conspicuously similar to both Google and Yahoo's, and contain literally none of the nonsensical related searches you mentioned. Since you haven't provided a link to the search results page, we must conclude that you made an error inputting the search string, you're intentionally spreading misinformation, some malware is altering your search results, or Microsoft altered the contents of the page between when you posted and this post.
I'm not a huge fan of Bing (I tried it, and I still use Google save for GPS-based local result searches on my phone; I prefer the Google interface), but it seems to produce reasonable search results.
So, please, provide a link to the Bing search results that are so egregiously wrong. I'm sure we'd all be interested in seeing how to replicate your results.
The licensing for Windows Server doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the size of the directory.
With Server 2008, you have a matrix of options. You can choose whether you want to count licenses by computers or users by the type of CAL you buy (Device or User). Then, you can choose whether you want to license the number of simultaneous connections to a single server (per-server) or by the number of discrete users or devices that have accessed any server (per-user or per-device). Clearly, if you only have one server and it's only being used for authentication, per-server licensing with device CALs makes sense. You only need to purchase sufficient CALs to cover number of computers that will simultaneously authenticate. Another option would be to go with user CALs, but it's probably easier to calculate how many computers will be simultaneously authenticating against or querying the directory. Once you get multiple servers, however, per-server licensing quickly gets expensive. For example, if you have three shifts of 10 users and go with 10 device CALs, per-server licensing will require 30 CALs if you have 3 servers. In per-device mode, however, it only requires 10 CALs. So, in a large deployment with multiple servers, you'll typically go with per-device licensing with device CALs (if users share computers) or per-user licensing with user CALs (if users use multiple computers or all have their own computers). This is because per-device/per-user mode doesn't license the servers; the CAL is good for connecting to any server in your network. In practice, only in the case of User CALs with per-user licensing do you need a number of CALs equal to the number of active users in your directory. You still don't necessarily need one license per user, however, as you can assign CALs away from deactivated users, move CALs from users on leave to temporary users, and use one CAL for a single named user who happens to use multiple accounts.
It appears as if this is a statistical reporting tool, given the URLs to which it calls home. All in all, it seems reasonably innocuous -- even if Symantec's response to it is unnecessarily heavy-handed.
The Wacom Cintiq monitor/tablet connected as a secondary display gets you pretty close to that... if you're willing to spend the cash. It doesn't have complex haptic feedback and requires a stylus, but it's a step in the right direction.
I suspect what they've done is track down expensive applications on Windows Mobile, and presented them as if these were typical or the only ones available.
That's exactly what they've done. A stock Windows Mobile phone without any carrier customization comes with everything listed except for TV, a full-screen keyboard, and a PDF reader, and most carrier-customized phones come with software to cover those as well. There's also a wide variety of free as in beer and free as in speech software to cover those deficiencies; GSPlayer is an excellent media player, Adobe has Acrobat for Pocket PC as a free download, etc. Part of the reason for this is that Windows Mobile is an extremely open system for software development, and the other part is that carriers don't lock down their Windows Mobile phones.
Of course, if you have a strong iBias and want to claim that "only software you *buy* counts as 'real' software because the iPhone is awesome and Windows Mobile sucks," then sure, you might have to spend some money... but on the other hand, no one I know who's used a Windows Mobile phone is complaining about its lack of functionality or how it needs a "real" e-mail client, for instance.
As someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety: 9-10 of meditation, exercise and healthy eating have helped far more than my doctors singular advice to take 3 different medications for over a year.
Indeed exercise and meditation have been shown to assist with depression. It's also worth noting that there's growing evidence that "depression," as a disorder, has several different biochemical etiologies. What works for Alice's depression might not work for Bob's, because they're not being influenced by the same neurochemistry. This is also a possible reason why anti-depressants have difficulty faring well against placebos in aggregate.
Interestingly enough, to echo your "treating the illness and not the patient" remark, some meta-analyses out of clinical psychology indicate that a combination of psychotherapy techniques (cognitive-behavioral, generally) and drugs produce a superior outcome to either alone. The implication is that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists shouldn't just "treat the illness" in the manner that they understand -- a multi-modal approach is the way to go.
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
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Making the statement that Herbal remedies don't work is simply stupid.
The author almost assuredly isn't making a blanket statement like that (and the review doesn't say he is). Though I've not read the book, the usual skeptical issue with herbal medicine is that it involves justifying taking herbs in what amounts to randomly selected doses without any reliable empirical evidence to justify such behavior. That an herb has been historically used to treat an illness is not justification to do so now; what it is justification to do is investigate whether the herb is effective and safe. Ultimately, the goal is to determine what in the herb has the desired effect and how that substance actually works. *That's* evidence-based medicine based on herbs.
Chiropractics is the manipulation of bones and joints.
That is the method of chiropractic, yes. But *why* do chiropractors do that? Yes, some it to treat back and joint pain only, and yes, some manipulations are effective in that regard. However, more than a few toe the party line that chiropractic is the manipulation of bones and joints to cure subluxations, which are "something" that causes disease. Originally, subluxations were believed to be spinal misalignments; this has been disproven (you can't find them in correlation with other diseases). Right now, the term has no solid operational definition, which is a hallmark of quackery.
I hesitate to come down particularly hard on chiropractic, however, because evidence does exist indicating that spinal manipulation can relieve back pain. However, I'd be curious to see if a chiropractor is much better at that than a trained masseuse.
That means that if your arm gets yanked out of it's socket, and you go to the doctor and they pop it back in, THAT IS CHIROPRACTICS; An extreme example, sure, but chiropractics none the less.
Only in woo-woo world. Words have meanings, you know, and what you've done here is massively generalize the meaning of a word that actually does have a specific meaning.
While the number of quacks in homeopathy is immense, vaccines are basically homeopathy. The premise being that you get the body to fight a desires by introducing the same symptoms as the disease so that the body can heal itself.
Once again, you are taking a word with a meaning and massively generalizing it to disingenuously suggest it means something else. Yes, there is a concept in homeopathy of "the toxin when sufficiently diluted has a positive effect," but that's because homeopaths believe that a sufficiently diluted toxin actually has an opposite effect, in an interesting take on sympathetic magic. More modern practitioners try to justify that by claiming that water has an "essential memory" of a substance that's diluted in it, a claim which has been disproven.
At any rate, vaccines are not based on those principles. While the "toxin having a positive effect" concept exists in both, homeopaths merely believe that while vaccines have a well-studied and demonstrable positive effect. Vaccines -- which are made of a measurable amount of dangerous material, as opposed to the completely undetectable quantities in homeopathy -- operate by providing a challenge to the immune system, which reacts by producing antibodies and establishing a chemically-mediated "memory" of how to react to that antigen in the future.
Getting back to my comment on herbs, note the difference between vaccination and homeopathy. Vaccination works, repeatably. We didn't know how initially, but further investigation indicated the underlying system, which allowed vaccination to be refined. Homeopathy has completed none of these steps.
Once we make a vaccine that is not a watered down version of the real disease, we will be performing homeopathy by definitions.
No. You clearly don't know what homeopathy means if you claim such a thing. Homeopathy is *all about* wateri
I'd say this man's story is less a tale about how Microsoft can't retain bloggers, and more a tale about Vista being so flawed that it's easy for someone to get burned out whilst spinning it as great.
I honestly can't decide if this is a brilliant troll playing off the "scientists in this field like to yell down Unverifiable Results from On High" theme, or someone who really does believe that it's ethical for a scientist to make oblique references to unpublished research then fail to provide any of:
a) their prior work in the field; b) other people's prior work in the field that's related or that demonstrates the same effect; c) their name, the name of their research lab, or their affiliation; d) any information whatsoever about the methodology, short of what I can only interpret as "we did a repeated-measures design with 'type of violence' as the independent variable and 'level of violent behavior' as the dependent variable."
As a scientist who happens to be versed in this area myself, I question why you chose to rely on an appeal to authority to support your point and have thus far failed to answer questions on references or methodology. Don't say "publishers won't take research that's already out there," because I know (and you should) that discussions in a public forum hardly count as archival publications for the purposes of journals. Further, it is quite possible to discuss the methodology of a study without disclosing the results.
In short, I call shenanigans.
Also: for those keeping score, the research does tend to be mixed on the exact effects on media violence in general and video game violence in particular. One major problem for the "video games cause violent behavior" interpretation of the data is that there's no sociological effect; when violent video game use increases, violent crime does not, in fact, always increase. The question of what the effects of violent video games are is a multi-dimensional and nuanced one that's in many ways tied up with the methodology used to answer it -- looking at aggressive behavior immediately after play isn't the same as looking at it over time, for instance.
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When was the last time any Office application didn't brake file compatibility with previous versions.
Once again, for all of you people who just can't be helped to do any research on Office format compatibility:
You can download the Office Compatibility Pack for free and install it on any version of Office all the way back to Office XP. This will let you read the Office 2007 formats. Office 2007 itself can save in the Office 97-2003 format, in addition to a variety of other formats.
There's a lot of legitimate complaints you can make about Microsoft, but the one you can never really make is that they ignore backwards compatibility. Microsoft, in fact, goes to considerable lengths to maintain backwards compatibility -- more than they ought to, some might say.
In fairness to the GP, you're incorrect about STR. STR provides a bonus to melee attacks that's roughly 50% that of the characteristic focus damage bonus, with a cap that's been recently revised to be relatively easy (some would say trivial) to reach. I'd cite the dev posts on this from the official forums, but I'm lazy and you clearly have an account and can look them up yourself. :) I will say that I do like the Characteristic Focus approach generally, but dislike the fact that, for many characters, it's far better to hit hard and fast -- which means DEX and EGO are your preferred stats. I do feel bad for people who went with PRE, given the currently broken threat mechanics. As it stands, heals, as they scale off PRE, have the highest threat generation in the entire game in order to prevent their users' high PREs from making them practically untargetable by mobs.
I'll partially agree with the GP in that the number of powers you use is relatively small, and this is coming from a Sorcery framework player -- for those not in the know, the Sorcery framework offers up a smorgasbord of powers, from AE buffs to debuffs to pets. Unfortunately, most of the powers are painfully weak due to CO's choice, just like CoH's, to use unlimited, additive effect stacking. CO also only really offers three types of attack powers: click powers, maintained powers (hold the button for a continuous effect), and charge powers (hold the button for a greater effect which is released when you left off the button). Because -- at least up to the end of beta -- very few powers had cooldowns, you really only needed one power of each type, because there wasn't a compelling argument to shuffle among multiple powers of the same type. Essentially, CO has a ton of powers to choose from, and you agonize over what to choose because all of the choices are equally poor. I'd often find myself going 4-6 levels without training up because it'd just be a waste of time to grab an extremely situational power or an awful, expensive, useless one.
I'd argue that there's two reasons why people feel unheroic in CO. One is that it's not clear a passive defensive power is mandatory for soloing, as the damage bonuses from offensive passives aren't high enough to offset the loss of survivability unless you specialize in AE attacks. Towards the end of closed beta, the devs mentioned that they were going to consider making that a bit more obvious. The second reason is that the damage balance across mob types tends to make boss (ahem, "Master Villain") fights boring. Villains have higher sustained DPS than Master Villains, while Master Villains have higher burst DPS. This is no big shock to anyone who plays most MMOs; typically, bosses hit slowly but extremely hard to keep healers from getting overwhelmed. The problem in CO is that you can hold Block to mitigate 50% or more of the damage from those big attacks, and the game tips you off on when to do this. Your passive defensives stack with this, so the overall mitigation is surprisingly high. On the other hand, you can't constantly Block against the Villains, since Blocking is a zero-sum game; you can't attack while blocking, so all you're doing is slowing the loss of HP. Perhaps most importantly, slow attacks are easier to dodge (in CO parlance; in typical design parlance, a CO Dodge is a variable mitigation applied to every attack that scales by opponent attack rate), so you'll generally mitigate more of the attack anyway. The end result is that, generally, the Master Villains end up doing less damage over time than their Villain minions. This is especially noticeable at low levels in Canada, where you fight a fair number of MVs and some, such as Mr. Zombie and the Overmind, generally can't damage you enough to overcome your HP regeneration rate. It's quite unheroic to worry more about the minions than the boss, I'd argue, but that's exactly the way the damage and mitigation mechanics in CO work. To alter this balance at higher levels, the devs made the Master Villains and especially Super Vil
In fairness to the GP, World of Warcraft doesn't require "installation" to run. You can copy it to a USB stick of sufficient size and run it from there on any computer without having to install it; I often do this when I'm on the road and want to get a bit of virtual adventure in. WoW's config is stored in its directory, not the registry.
The network copying issue, though, is indicative of a problem that isn't OS-related, I'd argue. :)
*If* it's a random sample, which given that it's an opt-in system run by a for-profit company that you'd only know about if you read InfoWorld and that requires installing a piece of software and giving out personal information to use, stretches credulity.
No, here we have an excellent example of a selection bias that essentially ensures that our sample is not representative of the population of Windows systems. In fact, I would hazard to guess that the sample is only representative of the population of machines in the SMB segment managed by technically savvy but inexperienced staff ("cowboy IT"), combined with a small set of machines in test environments across all enterprises, added to a set of personal computers run by IT personnel, conglomerated with those same IT people's work machines. That leads us to believe that this sample is reading Windows machines that aren't representative of the corporate environment as a whole, and likely not at all representative of the consumer market.
I'd love to see some evidence that the sample isn't biased to the point of being useless for drawing conclusions across the board, but I'm just not seeing it.
I'm guessing that's some sort of internal agreement with your IT department or outsourced IT provider, because speaking as someone with an Enterprise license agreement and a support contract with software support through IBM, there's nothing binding me or my users to a particular technology stack.
That said, we end up sticking with IE because of obsolete external applications. ADI Time's web site is an excellent example of a site that only runs in IE using Compatibility Mode, and since we use that for leave management at the insistence of HR and a long-running contract, we have to keep IE around. Personally, I'd like to move to Firefox or Chrome; not being subject to our normal software installation rules, I actually use Chrome as my primary browser. We don't install it and offer it as a choice for users because our users are, sadly, not the sort of people who'd deal well with being told, "Well, if it doesn't work in one browser, try the other one." Some of them don't grok that there is such a thing as a "web browser" and need to be told to open "the Internet" (i.e., Internet Explorer) instead.
I think the major limiters to F/OSS adoption in the corporation are a relative lack of mature management tools, the increased support costs due to user ineptitude and limited support resources, and general corporate inertia. Specific contracts that bind a company to a particular technology stack probably fall into the category of "more common than you'd expect, but less common than you'd think," and it's certainly not a Microsoft-specific thing -- and shame on the CIO who signs such a contract, or buys a piece of software that isn't cross-platform compatible.
Not to start a language holy war or anything, but we use IIS and the .NET Framework by choice, not because we're forced to do so. :)
SMB 1.0 is covered by at least one patent, and Microsoft has applied for a patent on SMB 2.0.
Neither protocol is covered by the Open Specification Promise or the Community Promise.
So, yes, there's a potential patent issue looming here. The EU judgment quoted below is interesting in that it only requires Microsoft allow use of the interoperability information on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms, which means they could simply charge the same amount for a license to the Samba developers as they do to other companies. Depending on the nature of the patent license, that could run afoul of the GPL (if the license fee is per distributed copy, for instance, or only allows software distribution by the patent licensee -- both of which would restrict the redistribution rights of subsequent users and violate the GPL's terms).
Frankly, I feel they ought to put SMB under the Open Specification Promise, but it's entirely possible there's some patents lurking there that are licensed by Microsoft that'd make that impossible.
It's been available through volume licensing since August 7th.
At the company where I work (Enterprise Agreement, so we're not small :) ), I'm already planning our Windows 7 implementation. The moment ShoreTel, our VOIP system, releases its Windows 7 compatible software, we'll rebuild our standard image and begin our migration to 7 Enterprise. Most of our servers are running Server 2008 or 2008 R2 already anyway. The advantages from the corporate standpoint (DirectAccess, better group policy, BranchCache, MED-V application virtualization) are too good to ignore. Many of those we talk to are planning to do the same, since XP's getting rather long in the tooth these days.
Regardless of the user interface, that's how most users learn.
If you talk about large-scale ERP software, which generally violates all UI guidelines of the platforms on which it runs, you find the exact same effect. Switching from, say, Daly & Wolcott to SAP causes users to have the same reactions, even when their workflow hasn't changed. "I can't figure out how to save the sales order!" "Click the save button at the top of the screen." "Where?" "See the little disk? That's the save icon." "That's not how it was before!"
People without -- and I hate to use the term here -- "computer fluency" learn applications and interfaces, not workflows and common elements. They don't learn "working with files," they learn "saving a spreadsheet in Excel." I'm not sure what the way out of this is, but I feel the research suggest that it's working with a number of user interfaces and providing more intuitive UIs.
Xen, for instance, isn't too difficult to work with on Debian, at least, and for the price point kicks the snot out of VMWare. Unfortunately, where it's lacking is management tools unless you buy a commercial implementation.
In fact, I'd argue that there's a good bit of F/OSS that's superior to the proprietary versions, and I personally like Linux for aging computers, kiosk applications, single-purpose devices (dynamic VLAN server, static web server, FTP server, router), and any situation where TCO is predominantly determined by initial price and not ongoing support cost. This is one of the unique selling propositions for F/OSS, and focusing more on that instead of "Microsoft is evil and Windows sucks" -- especially when giving companies like Google and, to a lesser extent, Apple a free pass and ignoring the significant improvements in Microsoft software quality lately -- will win more converts. Focusing on attacking Microsoft often comes off as hypocritical and misinformed.
Nope.
Windows 2000 receives security updates through 7/31/2010.
And look: I can pull a given security bulletin, say MS09-010: Vulnerabilities in WordPad and Office Text Converters Could Allow Remote Code Execution (960477), and find that it has a patch in for Windows 2000 SP4.
Or you could download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats which is free, doesn't require genuine software validation, and will patch anything back to Office 2000, which was released in 1999. It's a quick download and takes very little time to install.
The claim that Microsoft forces you to upgrade Office to maintain file format compatibility is simply incorrect. Arguing that you must upgrade to continue receiving support is disingenuous, because almost every software vendor does this -- including the F/OSS ones.
NSAIDs are not safe in certain populations and opiates carry significant side effects, tolerance issues, and the risk of psychological and physical dependence. Paracetamol, despite its liver risk and (usually) lower efficacy, is generally well-tolerated. The mechanism of liver damage is such that, if you stay under your NAPQI clearance rate, you'll be fine; the dosing information on paracetamol is designed to keep people from exceeding this threshold.
As analgesics go, for long term use, paracetamol's one of the safest bets; NSAIDs will destroy your GI tract unless taken with a proton pump inhibitor such as omeprazole (Prilosec), and opiates cause physical dependency. Now, whether you consider the latter effect as something to care about is another matter entirely, but currently, drug laws in the United States present a significant obstacle to a doctor prescribing opiates properly for long-term pain management where dependency is likely.
So, paracetamol still plays a valid role in pain management. Despite the threat of liver damage, its safety profile overall is quite favorable.
Microsoft licensing can be a bit tricky at the server level, what with CALs and server licenses that both have different rules depending on which server software you're talking about, but client licensing is pretty straightforward.
There's two components you need to worry about. The first one is the OS license; the other one is Software Assurance. If you buy a computer with an OS, it's already licensed, so you don't have to worry about buying a new one. If you buy the machine bare, you need to purchase an OS license for it. Now, in both cases, the license is only for that version of the operating system and its patches/service packs. That's where Software Assurance comes in. By paying a yearly fee, you get a variety of benefits (web-based training, phone support incidents, home use rights, etc.) as well as upgrade and downgrade rights. If you have SA for Windows Client, you can upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out, or downgrade to Windows 95 if you have to for some dumb legacy app. I can't tell you if $90/year/license is correct, because it depends on your volume license agreement.
As for VL itself, you can start with Open at 5 licenses. I'd highly recommend CDW as a license partner; they're easy to talk to and quite helpful.
There was an expert system developed some time ago called Mycin. What made Mycin interesting is its high performance rate relative to other subject matter experts. In fact, to the extent to which this area's been pursued lately in academic circles (which is to say, not much; the current hot topics in AI are computer vision, emotion detection, embodied cognition, and robotics), the results have been similar. The expert systems produce results on par with, or superior to, experts in the field.
That said, there's strong pushback in this area from doctors, just as teachers and school administrators are typically opposed to intelligent tutoring systems despite their excellent outcomes. Integration with other systems and the user interface have been issues as well; academic software tends to be of the "stovepipe" variety. There's also a legitimate concern about overreliance on the technology.
It is worth noting, though, that the limited quality (in terms of sensitivity and specificity) of medical information means that the expert system actually needs to be relatively complex. You don't want the expert system to return thousands of equal probability diagnoses, or alternatively to leap to the wrong conclusion based on sparse data.
The article isn't terribly clear, but a close reading seems to indicate that the wording is a rhetorical touch; China is lending money to the United States, but it does so through the purchase of Treasury bonds. Treasury bonds constitute a means of financing a budget deficit, you see, so you can view China buying Treasury bonds sold by the U.S. to generate funds to cover a budget deficit as China lending money to the U.S. to finance its deficit. (As a side note, you can view buying bonds in a company in the same light; a bond is, in essence, a financial instrument that constitutes a loan.)
In short, it's exactly as the GP says it is. CBS tried to dumb it down and in the process created an article that's somewhat confusing to those who know more than nothing about the subject. :)
The results appear to be the same for me whether I use IE 8, Chrome 2, or Firefox 3 on Windows 7 RC.
I've got to wonder what search terms you're using, because the Bing search results for "the dark knight" are conspicuously similar to both Google and Yahoo's, and contain literally none of the nonsensical related searches you mentioned. Since you haven't provided a link to the search results page, we must conclude that you made an error inputting the search string, you're intentionally spreading misinformation, some malware is altering your search results, or Microsoft altered the contents of the page between when you posted and this post.
I'm not a huge fan of Bing (I tried it, and I still use Google save for GPS-based local result searches on my phone; I prefer the Google interface), but it seems to produce reasonable search results.
So, please, provide a link to the Bing search results that are so egregiously wrong. I'm sure we'd all be interested in seeing how to replicate your results.
The licensing for Windows Server doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the size of the directory.
With Server 2008, you have a matrix of options. You can choose whether you want to count licenses by computers or users by the type of CAL you buy (Device or User). Then, you can choose whether you want to license the number of simultaneous connections to a single server (per-server) or by the number of discrete users or devices that have accessed any server (per-user or per-device). Clearly, if you only have one server and it's only being used for authentication, per-server licensing with device CALs makes sense. You only need to purchase sufficient CALs to cover number of computers that will simultaneously authenticate. Another option would be to go with user CALs, but it's probably easier to calculate how many computers will be simultaneously authenticating against or querying the directory. Once you get multiple servers, however, per-server licensing quickly gets expensive. For example, if you have three shifts of 10 users and go with 10 device CALs, per-server licensing will require 30 CALs if you have 3 servers. In per-device mode, however, it only requires 10 CALs. So, in a large deployment with multiple servers, you'll typically go with per-device licensing with device CALs (if users share computers) or per-user licensing with user CALs (if users use multiple computers or all have their own computers). This is because per-device/per-user mode doesn't license the servers; the CAL is good for connecting to any server in your network. In practice, only in the case of User CALs with per-user licensing do you need a number of CALs equal to the number of active users in your directory. You still don't necessarily need one license per user, however, as you can assign CALs away from deactivated users, move CALs from users on leave to temporary users, and use one CAL for a single named user who happens to use multiple accounts.
Check out Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 Licensing FAQ and Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 CAL overview page.
I've submitted the file to ThreatExpert, and the report is available here: http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=91b564d825a3487ae5b5fafe57260810
It appears as if this is a statistical reporting tool, given the URLs to which it calls home. All in all, it seems reasonably innocuous -- even if Symantec's response to it is unnecessarily heavy-handed.
The Wacom Cintiq monitor/tablet connected as a secondary display gets you pretty close to that... if you're willing to spend the cash. It doesn't have complex haptic feedback and requires a stylus, but it's a step in the right direction.
I suspect what they've done is track down expensive applications on Windows Mobile, and presented them as if these were typical or the only ones available.
That's exactly what they've done. A stock Windows Mobile phone without any carrier customization comes with everything listed except for TV, a full-screen keyboard, and a PDF reader, and most carrier-customized phones come with software to cover those as well. There's also a wide variety of free as in beer and free as in speech software to cover those deficiencies; GSPlayer is an excellent media player, Adobe has Acrobat for Pocket PC as a free download, etc. Part of the reason for this is that Windows Mobile is an extremely open system for software development, and the other part is that carriers don't lock down their Windows Mobile phones.
Of course, if you have a strong iBias and want to claim that "only software you *buy* counts as 'real' software because the iPhone is awesome and Windows Mobile sucks," then sure, you might have to spend some money... but on the other hand, no one I know who's used a Windows Mobile phone is complaining about its lack of functionality or how it needs a "real" e-mail client, for instance.
As someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety: 9-10 of meditation, exercise and healthy eating have helped far more than my doctors singular advice to take 3 different medications for over a year.
Indeed exercise and meditation have been shown to assist with depression. It's also worth noting that there's growing evidence that "depression," as a disorder, has several different biochemical etiologies. What works for Alice's depression might not work for Bob's, because they're not being influenced by the same neurochemistry. This is also a possible reason why anti-depressants have difficulty faring well against placebos in aggregate.
Interestingly enough, to echo your "treating the illness and not the patient" remark, some meta-analyses out of clinical psychology indicate that a combination of psychotherapy techniques (cognitive-behavioral, generally) and drugs produce a superior outcome to either alone. The implication is that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists shouldn't just "treat the illness" in the manner that they understand -- a multi-modal approach is the way to go.
Making the statement that Herbal remedies don't work is simply stupid.
The author almost assuredly isn't making a blanket statement like that (and the review doesn't say he is). Though I've not read the book, the usual skeptical issue with herbal medicine is that it involves justifying taking herbs in what amounts to randomly selected doses without any reliable empirical evidence to justify such behavior. That an herb has been historically used to treat an illness is not justification to do so now; what it is justification to do is investigate whether the herb is effective and safe. Ultimately, the goal is to determine what in the herb has the desired effect and how that substance actually works. *That's* evidence-based medicine based on herbs.
Chiropractics is the manipulation of bones and joints.
That is the method of chiropractic, yes. But *why* do chiropractors do that? Yes, some it to treat back and joint pain only, and yes, some manipulations are effective in that regard. However, more than a few toe the party line that chiropractic is the manipulation of bones and joints to cure subluxations, which are "something" that causes disease. Originally, subluxations were believed to be spinal misalignments; this has been disproven (you can't find them in correlation with other diseases). Right now, the term has no solid operational definition, which is a hallmark of quackery.
I hesitate to come down particularly hard on chiropractic, however, because evidence does exist indicating that spinal manipulation can relieve back pain. However, I'd be curious to see if a chiropractor is much better at that than a trained masseuse.
That means that if your arm gets yanked out of it's socket, and you go to the doctor and they pop it back in, THAT IS CHIROPRACTICS; An extreme example, sure, but chiropractics none the less.
Only in woo-woo world. Words have meanings, you know, and what you've done here is massively generalize the meaning of a word that actually does have a specific meaning.
While the number of quacks in homeopathy is immense, vaccines are basically homeopathy. The premise being that you get the body to fight a desires by introducing the same symptoms as the disease so that the body can heal itself.
Once again, you are taking a word with a meaning and massively generalizing it to disingenuously suggest it means something else. Yes, there is a concept in homeopathy of "the toxin when sufficiently diluted has a positive effect," but that's because homeopaths believe that a sufficiently diluted toxin actually has an opposite effect, in an interesting take on sympathetic magic. More modern practitioners try to justify that by claiming that water has an "essential memory" of a substance that's diluted in it, a claim which has been disproven.
At any rate, vaccines are not based on those principles. While the "toxin having a positive effect" concept exists in both, homeopaths merely believe that while vaccines have a well-studied and demonstrable positive effect. Vaccines -- which are made of a measurable amount of dangerous material, as opposed to the completely undetectable quantities in homeopathy -- operate by providing a challenge to the immune system, which reacts by producing antibodies and establishing a chemically-mediated "memory" of how to react to that antigen in the future.
Getting back to my comment on herbs, note the difference between vaccination and homeopathy. Vaccination works, repeatably. We didn't know how initially, but further investigation indicated the underlying system, which allowed vaccination to be refined. Homeopathy has completed none of these steps.
Once we make a vaccine that is not a watered down version of the real disease, we will be performing homeopathy by definitions.
No. You clearly don't know what homeopathy means if you claim such a thing. Homeopathy is *all about* wateri
I'd say this man's story is less a tale about how Microsoft can't retain bloggers, and more a tale about Vista being so flawed that it's easy for someone to get burned out whilst spinning it as great.
I honestly can't decide if this is a brilliant troll playing off the "scientists in this field like to yell down Unverifiable Results from On High" theme, or someone who really does believe that it's ethical for a scientist to make oblique references to unpublished research then fail to provide any of:
a) their prior work in the field;
b) other people's prior work in the field that's related or that demonstrates the same effect;
c) their name, the name of their research lab, or their affiliation;
d) any information whatsoever about the methodology, short of what I can only interpret as "we did a repeated-measures design with 'type of violence' as the independent variable and 'level of violent behavior' as the dependent variable."
As a scientist who happens to be versed in this area myself, I question why you chose to rely on an appeal to authority to support your point and have thus far failed to answer questions on references or methodology. Don't say "publishers won't take research that's already out there," because I know (and you should) that discussions in a public forum hardly count as archival publications for the purposes of journals. Further, it is quite possible to discuss the methodology of a study without disclosing the results.
In short, I call shenanigans.
Also: for those keeping score, the research does tend to be mixed on the exact effects on media violence in general and video game violence in particular. One major problem for the "video games cause violent behavior" interpretation of the data is that there's no sociological effect; when violent video game use increases, violent crime does not, in fact, always increase. The question of what the effects of violent video games are is a multi-dimensional and nuanced one that's in many ways tied up with the methodology used to answer it -- looking at aggressive behavior immediately after play isn't the same as looking at it over time, for instance.